2007-07-17

Well, historically, the most important lesson from Microsoft - and one they themselves seem to have forgotten - is simply “Give your customers what they want”.

I think the reason Microsoft was so successful was that they filled a niche with some very basic technology (and in this case, early on, that basic technology was literally the BASIC language - that’s how they largely got started), and they sold it cheap and made it “good enough”. They didn’t play games with the customer.

Of course, that seems to have changed. A lot about the last few years of Microsoft seems to very much be playing games with customers: their licensing and what, seven different “versions” of Vista, and all the DRM crap they are trying to push on their customers are not actually what anybody wants.

So Microsoft has always been good about marketing and selling, and their strong hold on the market has also caused them to become a standardized platform. That’s generally all good for customers. They’ve left some of that behind (now they are trying to splinter their market on purpose with Vista and pushing DirectX 10 only on the new platform, for example), but I think their historical successes are worth looking at.

2007-07-07

The truth about pkgtool is not that it doesn't exist, but that it doesn't do any dependency checking

This is not to say that Slackware packages don't have dependencies, but rather that its package manager doesn't check for them. Dependency management is left up to the sysadmin, and that's the way we like it.

But I don't like it - personally I prefer the Debian package management.

A useful feature for many business applications is functionalityallowing the user to generate reports from data in an application.Spreadsheets are ideal for this purpose. Not only does a spreadsheetlay data out in a structured, scanable format, but it also gives theuser the opportunity to quickly and efficiently perform calculationson data. As it happens, the OpenOffice.org API exposes a very widerange of classes and methods that let you, the developer, integratethe OpenOffice.org spreadsheet application, called Calc, into yourapplication. A simple click of a button in an application can startup OpenOffice.org and transfer the application's data to acustomized spreadsheet.

This custom eBook from DevX and IBM Rational explains why choosing the correct architecture early in your development process is essential for success - both for your business and for you, personally, as a developer.